1415: Henry V's Year of Glory

by Mortimer, Ian

  But when at the end of this long day, he finally slept, something essential had changed. Henry had demonstrated to his contemporaries that he had God’s blessing in ruling by the sword. His divinely sanctioned victory meant that to carry on fighting was not only justifiable, it was God’s work. He had to do it. He was God’s instrument.

  Saturday 26th

  This morning Henry was up very early. He walked across the battlefield, looking at all the corpses. Where his men found Frenchmen alive, they either took them prisoner or killed them. Many Englishmen were amazed that so many of the corpses had already been stripped of all their armour and clothing. Between the pilfering of the local people and the looting of the English, the nobility of France had been left ‘naked just like those newly born’ in the mud.177

  After the battlefield had been scoured for any more French lords who had survived the night, and who could be taken prisoner and ransomed, the battlefield was abandoned, and the naked bodies left where they were. Henry ordered the army to move out. It was forty-five miles to Calais. The loss of a large number of horses during the raid by Isambard d’Agincourt and the men of Hesdin meant that many men had to walk. Many of the lesser prisoners also had to walk. For those on foot, it was a three-day journey to Calais.

  Sunday 27th

  After the battle the servants and friends of the Frenchmen who had been killed returned to the scene. The duke of Brabant’s body was found some way from the battlefield. It was naked and showed he had been wounded in the face and neck. He was one of the prisoners killed when the French had regrouped. Those who found the body were amazed that such an important man could be butchered in such a fashion. It seemed like an unchivalric, godless act. Sorrowfully they lifted his body and took it to Saint-Pol, where it was embalmed, ready for transportation to Brussels, to be buried.178

  News of the defeat reached the king and dauphin at Rouen. The old king, despite his illness, must have recognised instantly that this was the most terrible news of his thirty-five years on the throne. He asked who had died. Seven royal cousins, he was told. The duke of Bar and his brother, the duke of Brabant and his brother, the duke of Alençon, the count of Marle and Charles d’Albret. One can imagine the silent moment of disbelief that followed, as each man came to the king’s mind and then was acknowledged as dead. The messengers then told him the full extent of the tragedies – the deaths of the seigneur de Bacqueville, bearer of the Oriflamme, and Guichard Dauphin. The messengers went on to describe the particularly heavy casualties among the men of Hainault. The total of the French dead, they told him, was four thousand men-at-arms, including 1,400 knights and esquires.179

  Then they told him about the captured dukes of Orléans and Bourbon, and the counts of Vendôme and Richemont, and all the royal and noble prisoners.

  Monday 28th

  In London, news about Agincourt had yet to arrive. It was still believed that the English had been defeated, and the fate of the king was as yet unknown. Thus it was in a solemn mood that the people of London prepared to swear in their new mayor, Nicholas Wotton.

  The campaign looked to have been a disaster. It had been costly and had succeeded only in taking one town, which could be expected soon to be retaken by the French. Many men had fallen ill. The earl of Arundel was not the only one to have died since being sent home sick. Sir John Daubridgecourt, a Knight of the Garter and a close friend of Henry’s, who had attended the siege of Harfleur in the company of the incapacitated duke of Clarence, had also died.180 If this news about an English defeat was true, and the king was dead, what was it all for? Henry had gambled with the legitimacy of his entire dynasty – everything his father and the Lancastrian family’s retainers and supporters had risked their lives for – and lost. The thought must have occurred to many people at Westminster that, if the king had been killed in battle, it was to be expected that the Southampton plot would be praised and the earl of Cambridge seen as a martyr. In time someone else would try to rid England of its dubious dynasty.

  *

  Henry arrived at Guines, the English-held castle to the south of Calais, and there took up his quarters with his close companions and the most noble French prisoners. Here he held a council meeting to determine whether he should press on and try to extend the war. It occurred to him that, as he had a fully mobilised army with him, he might use it to attack the town of Ardres, which was not far away. There were other French-held forts in the Marches of Calais too; these perhaps were now vulnerable? But his councillors strongly advised him to desist from any further warfare. They told him that such victories as he had received, miraculous as they were, should suffice for his honour for the time being.181

  Tuesday 29th

  Early this morning a messenger arrived in the city of London, tired after riding all night from Dover. He had come from the English army. Far from being defeated, Henry had won a great victory over the French. Countless French men-at-arms lay dead, and the king was marching triumphantly, gloriously, through Northern France to Calais.

  This amazing news – an incredible turn-around after the dismal news of four days earlier – was a cause for exultation. It was proclaimed publicly on the steps of St Paul’s Cathedral that same morning. Chancellor Beaufort himself preached in the cathedral on the theme of the king’s safe delivery. Throughout the city the bells were rung. Joyously the new mayor and aldermen, together with an immense number of the freemen of the city of London, went in procession on foot to Westminster, as if in a great pilgrimage, to give thanks at the tomb of St Edward the Confessor for the safe delivery of the king and the great victory he had won.182

  Queen Joan, who attended the Westminster service, must have been torn. Her stepson the king had won a glorious victory; but her own sons, the duke of Brittany and the count of Richemont, had been on the opposing side. So too had her cousins, the duke of Brabant and the count of Nevers, and the dukes of Orléans and Anjou. What of them? She cannot have known whether her eldest son, the duke of Brittany, had observed the terms of his agreement with Henry and stayed away from the battle. Nor whether her younger son, the count of Richemont, had fought. So many of her French and Burgundian cousins had died, she was now told, as the bells rang out joyfully over Westminster.

  *

  The people of Calais had come a long way out of the town to greet Henry, so great was their joy at his victory. The priests and clerks of the town processed behind him as he approached the gates, singing We praise you, O Lord. The streets were filled with women and children as well as the men of the town, all shouting ‘Welcome, our sovereign lord!’ as he passed them with his councillors, leading the captured great lords of France.

  Few of his men received such a cheerful reception. The archers were barred entry. The fear was that they would not pay for their food in Calais, and start looting. So they were forced to camp outside the walls. They were desperate for food. Those who had taken prisoners, hoping to ransom them for large sums, were forced to sell them to the men of the town or their social superiors in return for nourishment. Otherwise they could not find enough sustenance to keep themselves alive, let alone their prisoners. It was a bitter stage of the journey for ‘the few’ who had helped Henry to his victory.183

  Wednesday 30th

  In Bordeaux, the news of the victory was still far off: it would be another three weeks before they heard. The mayor and jurats of the city were still considering Henry’s request for siege engines and cannon, contained in a letter he had sent them in June, which they had received on 20 August.184 It is probable that they had only recently heard of the fall of Harfleur, and so were rethinking their decision to send the guns. After due deliberation, they decided that it was now too late in the season for them to respond helpfully, since the winter would soon be upon them and Henry’s campaign would be halted for the winter months.185

  Thursday 31st

  The archers starving outside the walls of Calais were not the only unfortunate English victims of Henry’s success. Recently a payment had been
made for arresting and bringing John Foxholes (former chaplain of Lord Scrope), Thomas Blase (formerly Scrope’s steward) and other men who had served in the household of the late Lord Scrope to Westminster.186 Today they were led before the king’s council to be questioned regarding the goods of the executed traitor. Henry’s miraculous victory only heightened the sinful context of Scrope’s actions in June. If some of the goods described in Scrope’s will had been disposed of in accordance with Scrope’s instructions, and not delivered to the king, then the lord’s crime of treason had been compounded by his servants’ disobedience.

  The bishop of Durham and Chancellor Beaufort demanded to know from Foxholes and Blase into whose hands the goods and chattels of their late master had come. They said on oath that they knew nothing of the goods. They said that John Bliton wrote the late lord’s will, and that he was now a clerk in the kitchen of the duchess of York. But they did not know what the will said or even where it was. The two bishops continued to interrogate them, knowing that men in Lord Scrope’s service had concealed portions of his wealth from the royal coroner. They asked Thomas Blase how many vessels of silver Scrope had possessed. Six dozen and no more, he replied. Another man, Robert Newton, a canon of the king’s chapel at Westminster who had previously served in Lord Scrope’s chapel, was brought in and questioned as to how many copes Scrope had possessed. One hundred and twenty, he replied.187

  The upshot of these interrogations is not known. Some of Scrope’s possessions were later located at Pontefract Castle, and an order for them to be confiscated issued three weeks later.188 Others had been found in London by yeomen of the king’s chamber at the time of his arrest and handed over to the mayor.189 But the difficulty in tracking the rest of Scrope’s possessions suggests that some of his household servants kept their master’s belongings, or disposed of them in their own way, rather than render them to the king. Later an enquiry would be made in Yorkshire as to the whereabouts of goods concealed from the king’s officers.190

  *

  In Paris it was said that John the Fearless was pleased by the English victory at Agincourt, for this was a defeat for the Armagnacs.191 The reality was nowhere near so straightforward. He had tried to play the kings of England and France off against each other and in one sense had succeeded: the Armagnacs had been defeated and humiliated in the most public way possible. But in another sense he had lost terribly, for he had lost both of his brothers: the duke of Brabant and the count of Nevers. Only five days earlier he had attended the christening of the count of Nevers’ son. Many more Burgundians, including his vassals from Picardy and Flanders, lay dead in the mud at Agincourt.

  Those who saw Agincourt as the work of God must have suspected that the deaths of both of John’s brothers was divine retribution for John’s murder of the old duke of Orléans in 1407. Medieval chroniclers and moralists liked to trace such full turns of the wheel of fortune. It was an obvious conclusion. It had been that killing that had started the whole civil war and had left France without clear leadership and vulnerable to Henry’s ambitions. We have no way of knowing what Jacquette Griffart – the woman who had witnessed the murder – thought of the news of the battle and the deaths, but, if she was still alive these eight years later, the whole period probably struck her as a protracted and sickening bloody mess.

  November

  Friday 1st: Feast of All Saints

  THE FORMAL BEGINNING of winter: the season of the dead. Now the light was fading earlier in the afternoon, and the working day was shorter. At this feast of All Saints, men’s and women’s thoughts turned to the departed. People wore their mourning clothes. Traditionally men around the king wore black funeral robes, and the king himself put on a purple velvet gown. Churches burnt candles late into the night, and in some places torches were carried in procession. Many churches began ringing their bells after the evening service – and carried on ringing them until midnight – in an attempt to comfort the souls of the dead in Purgatory. Had you been walking through the streets of London on this moonless night, you would have heard the bells of many parish churches ringing out in the darkness, across the cold ground. Had you been living in a rural village, from the quiet of your bedchamber you may well have heard the distant ringing coming across the fields. Those in the churches, their faces solemn in the golden glow of candlelight, would have remembered and prayed for their lost family members – fathers, mothers, children, many of whom would have died before their time due to war, childbirth and disease.1

  In Northern France the candles, prayers and commemorative ringing would have had an extra poignancy. Many of the Frenchmen slain at Agincourt came from the vicinity of the battle, from Artois, Picardy and Flanders. Whole families had been wiped out. In many cases three or four members of one family had proudly ridden out to join the army defending France one week earlier. Now their wives and mothers were bereft, lighting the candles and hearing the bells, not knowing whether their husbands died unshriven of their sins, and without hope of entering Heaven. Many others did not know whether their husbands and sons were alive or dead, hoping against hope that they had been taken as prisoners by the English to Calais. Many women would have understood their fate in terms of a sudden legal danger, realising that their lands would now fall to another member of their husband’s family – a brother or cousin, perhaps – with the result that they stood to lose wealth, status and protection. Some women would just have looked at the late-night candles, simply trying to come to terms with the knowledge that the men to whom they had been closest in life were now among the dead, and that the sound of the bells ringing out from the church was their last communication to them.2

  Saturday 2nd

  At Perpignan, in Aragon, the Holy Roman Emperor was furious. He was seeing his entire mission to reunite the Church threatened by another self-interested pope.

  Sigismund had left Constance on 17 July and headed towards Nice and then Narbonne. There, at the end of August, he had declared that his purpose in travelling was to secure the resignation of Benedict XIII, and he would wait there for the pope.3 Benedict had travelled as far as Perpignan, where he had learnt that his protector, King Ferdinand of Aragon, was very sick. Although Ferdinand was still not yet thirty-five, he was dying – and his physicians advised him not to travel to Narbonne. Nevertheless Ferdinand disregarded their dire warnings and had himself carried on board a ship, by which he travelled to Perpignan, there to confront the recalcitrant pope. He invited Sigismund to join them; Sigismund obliged, arriving on 19 September. There had followed six weeks of bitter wrangling.

  The problem was that Benedict had no intention of simply abdicating, as Gregory XII had done. Rather, like John XXIII, he wanted to use the negotiations to secure certain advantages. At one point he went so far as to suggest that he himself should personally choose the next pope for the whole Church. He also was keen that the council should be removed to a place more in keeping with his tastes – somewhere by the sea, perhaps. Eventually Sigismund demanded a simple abdication. It was refused.

  King Ferdinand watched all this with the impatience of a dying man. He knew that Benedict would be lost without his support – only the Spanish nation was standing by him. But after the weeks of wrangling, Ferdinand could see that if he died of his present sickness, which was likely, it might be said of him that he had abetted Benedict in his determination to cling on to power. The time had come for a drastic measure. Yesterday Ferdinand had sent his son and heir, Alfonso, to Benedict with a summons and a demand that he resign the papal title immediately. Benedict had responded by publicly creating several cardinals and declaring he was going to move his papal court to Peñiscola, a castle on the south coast, south of Valencia. Clearly the purpose was to avoid further negotiations with Sigismund, Ferdinand or any part of the Church outside Spain. Today Ferdinand sent his son back to Benedict, to demand once more that he abdicate. The pope evasively answered that he would send his answer from Peñiscola.

  This was the point at which Sigismund lo
st his temper. Hearing that Benedict had taken ship, he declared he was returning to Narbonne. He did not even bother sending a farewell salutation to Ferdinand but set out immediately for Serrano. Ferdinand hurriedly sent a solemn embassy after him, imploring him to return to Perpignan and promising that he would act in such a way as to satisfy him. But Sigismund had had enough. If Ferdinand wanted to communicate with him further, he would find him at Narbonne.

  There could be no more hesitation for Ferdinand. Benedict was no longer worth supporting; he stood alone. All the other nations were insistent on the reunification of the Church. On top of this, if Ferdinand continued to hesitate, then he would jeopardise his agreement with Henry V, who had no regard for the French pope. Accordingly Ferdinand did as Sigismund requested. He sent further ambassadors to Narbonne to negotiate Benedict’s abdication. At the same time he sent another summons to Peñiscola. The days of Benedict’s pontificate were numbered.4